A computing environment may include a large number of hosts. The term “host” may refer to a physical machine and/or virtual machine, including hardware and/or software executing thereon (such as an operating system, a system service, a middleware program, and/or an application). A host newly added to a computing environment may need to interact with existing facilities that are available for use in the computing environment.
Some information that is necessary for interacting with existing facilities can be used by a host only if the information is available during initialization of the host. The host may need to execute an initialization process multiple times in order to (a) obtain information about the existing facilities and (b) utilize the obtained information within the host. As an example, a host may first execute an initialization process for a system service without any information about existing facilities. The system service may enable functionality that the host uses for obtaining information about the existing facilities. Then, the host may re-execute the initialization process for the system service, in order to configure the system service based on the information obtained about the existing facilities.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.